The New York Times published an op-ed on Friday night by A. Hope Jahren, a professor of geobiology at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, entitled “She Wanted to Do Her Research. He Wanted to Talk ‘Feelings.’” The piece landed with a bang — it has been shared widely among academics and nonacademics alike — and has since reverberated well beyond the sciences.
(A portion of this post is devoted to synthesizing the arguments in Ms. Jahren’s op-ed. You should read it here in full.)
Much of the recent attention to sexual harassment in the sciences has focused on serial offenders, such as the former University of California at Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy, who resigned in October after it was revealed that he had been accused of sexual harassment on numerous occasions, and had been found responsible by the university.
In her op-ed, Ms. Jahren takes stock of her inbox — “an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes,” she writes — in charting a pattern for how such harassment takes shape. In Ms. Jahren’s telling, here’s the process:
- “A woman (she is a student, a technician, a professor) gets an email and notices that the subject line is a bit off: ‘I need to tell you,’ or ‘my feelings.’”
- The body of the email refers, first, to the “altered physical and mental state of the author,” and then showers the recipient with the assurance that she is special in some way — “the important suggestion being that she has brought this upon herself,” Ms. Jahren writes.
- After deciding to ignore the email, the woman is cornered in some way by the senior scientist, now “satisfied with her tendency toward secrecy.” That meeting tends to turn “tentatively physical,” and the woman decides to go along because to resist “wouldn’t just be professionally dangerous, it would seem heartless.”
- “Then there are conferences, field trips, cocktail hours and retreats, whispering co-workers, rolling eyes and sadly shaking heads,” Ms. Jahren writes, which eventually trigger the woman’s realization that “he’s not going to stop because he doesn’t have to.”
It’s that sequence of events — initiated by “bad apples so rare they have been encountered by every single woman I know,” Ms. Jahren writes — that so often forces women out of science.
Mr. Marcy followed a similar pattern, according to those who worked with him. As The Chronicle’s Robin Wilson wrote in October, colleagues discovered Mr. Marcy had a “play book” for harassing female subordinates. This is how Joan T. Schmelz, a professor in the department of physics and materials science at the University of Memphis, described it:
Mr. Marcy, she says, would isolate a female student in his lab or find a way to talk to her privately on the campus, away from others. During the talk, he would make a slightly inappropriate comment, touch or kiss the student, and then apologize, according to what women told her. Depending on the reaction he got, she says, he would either back off or take another step forward. Students, she says, complained that he had given them rides home, taken them out to coffee, and told them he and his wife had an open relationship.
(Mr. Marcy has acknowledged the behavior, but says that it stopped years ago and that he has fallen victim to an atmosphere of hypersensitivity.)
The online reaction to Ms. Jahren’s op-ed suggests the female scientists who confided in her, as well as those who alleged harassment by Mr. Marcy, are hardly special cases:
Ms. Jahren’s inbox continued to be instructive even after the op-ed was published, she tweeted:
She also received notes from those on the other side of the harassment, she said:
Ms. Jahren later followed up on the role race can play in harassment, speaking specifically about women of color (abbreviated below as WOC) as an especially precarious population:
Even when they’re not made victims of sexual harassment, women in science often report having to overcome the feeling of being an outsider. In November, The Chronicle profiled four female astronomers who described the challenges of being a woman in the field.
And the sciences are hardly unique. Other disciplines have come under fire for similar concerns about a sexist culture, perhaps most notably, philosophy.
